Monthly Archives: November 2007

Recently, I was interviewed for a newspaper article about the gothic subculture in Syracuse, despite the fact that I reside in Ithaca. Originally, the writer just contacted me as the organizer of the meetup group, looking to talk to the locals. The “locals”, however, strongly encouraged her to interview me as well, which (as has already been mentioned) she did.

After placing adverts in local papers stressing his wealth with words like “tender and rich lawyer looks for a pretty lady to marry” and then “disgustingly rich lawyer looks for a pretty lady to marry”, he was still unable to find a wife.

He said: “I’ve got to the point where I have even been asking women I am meeting in the streets to marry me, but they always say no.”

Kacic, from Zagreb, said he had now accepted that he must be the ugliest man in the world.

It has, apparently, never occurred to him that his problem may be with his tactics. Certainly there are many gold digging women who care not a whit for personality or looks given her beau has enough money, but presumably they are all off shagging rich septuagenarian widowers, or living somewhere other than Croatia. For everyone else, his tactics would almost certainly ensure they keep their interactions with him to a minimum, if they even take his solicitations seriously.

I have to hand him this- effectively buying a press release to declare your wealth and eligibility, while not entirely novel, will almost certainly be an effective way to attract the former sort of “lady”.

Personally, I don’t think he’s too terribly ugly. He’s certainly not “ugliest man in the world” ugly. But what he lacks in hideousness he certainly makes up for in persistence, unperceptiveness, and social awkwardness.

On Friday night the cats were freaking out, chasing absolutely nothing with great glee around the living room. I know, cats often do that… only this time, the imaginary things they were chasing appeared to be in mid air, and my cats do not normally do that. At one point, one of Dexter’s hallucinations must have landed near my legs, because he just sat in front of me staring at them for a few minutes. As this was happening, I noted a draft which had not been there before against my ankles, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Saturday night, after returning from the VNV Nation concert in Rochester and listening to Art Bell talk about shadow people (which I’ve been familiar with and fascinated by for several months) during the car ride home, we decided to amuse ourselves by sharing first and second hand ghost stories (hearing other people’s purportedly true tales of the paranormal is something I’ve always loved).

This led to a discussion of Hypnogogia, which both Krissy and I have experienced in the past, and a realization that both of us not only share the general experience, but a specific manifestation. Both of us, she as a child and I as a teenager, have ‘woken’ to see the disembodied green face of an old man hovering above our beds, vivid at first and fading into the distance. This, of course, was a rather odd coincidence, and more than a touch creepy, and led us to wonder whether this is a common experience (I later found out that another friend has had a similar experience, only the face he saw was of someone he knew that had died).

Krissy later told me that as this conversation was occurring she saw a floating grey orb near us, and when she looked at me to see if I saw it too, I was apparently staring at it, though I don’t recall seeing anything at the time.

Which brings us to last night, and the spookiest occurrence to date. I was preparing for bed and I went into the bathroom, closing the door behind me, and starting cleaning up. As I examined myself in the mirror, I heard one of the cats playing with the shower curtain in the bathtub behind me, batting at the curtain and pulling it along the pole slightly. This in itself isn’t odd, so I ignored it, carrying on with my business. When I later turned behind me to look to see if the cat, now quiet, was ready to leave the room, there was no cat.

I, surprisingly, wasn’t that freaked out at first (though I did finish cleaning up with the door open after that). Though soon every time I looked into the mirror it was with a sense of dread, partly expecting to see something standing in the tub behind me, or the shower curtain moving of its own accord.

The observant will surely note that this seems tailor-made to freak me out, given my favorite childhood nightmare. Krissy noted that not only did this involve mirrors, but also cats, who also featured prominently in said nightmare.

… babies are parasites – alien entities growing inside of you, tapping into your blood supply to steal precious bodily fluids nutrients and oxygen until one day they burst forth in a sea of blood, inflicting unspeakable pain on their unfortunate host organism… Pain that lasts for up to eighteen years, in many cases.

Anyway, no big surprise here, but the placentas are in on it, too. They enable the infection, both by acting as a bridge between the parasite and host organism (transporting the aforementioned stolen nutrients) and by suppressing the host’s immune response, in much the same way as some terrestrial parasites.

One day they’ll surely discover further controlling substances these alien entities use to bend hosts to their whims- possibly some chemical exuded throughout the larval stages, causing the hosts to not only tolerate the parasite, but to sink large amounts of time and money into ensuring the thing’s well-being, despite the affect it has on the host’s own quality of life.

We must remain vigilant! By the time infection can be detected by science it may already be too late… and the host may no longer even desire a cure. Every day, this plague claims more lives. It doesn’t have to. There is a better way.

The Japanese have developed a piggy bank that will explode if you don’t feed it money often enough, forcing you to wander around collecting the scattered change for a while.

Personally, I think that would be more of a deterrent to putting any money in the thing, at least after the first explosion. Either that, or I would see all the loose change as free money, and just spend it.

Also, I wonder what kind of force the coins are launched at- it would be amazingly funny if they wrought havoc about the room, breaking windows and such.